


Grey Ship

by SkyHighDisco



Series: Grey Novelette [2]
Category: The Grand Tour (TV) RPF, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: AU, Boys take care of each other, Family, Friendship, Horror, Hospital, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of poisoning, Mystery, Surreal, That's a rule
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:00:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25516171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyHighDisco/pseuds/SkyHighDisco
Summary: James feels, in this abstruse moment, an insinuating lurch of a traitorous notion, that he isn’t where he is supposed to be anymore.
Relationships: Jeremy Clarkson & James May, Jeremy Clarkson & Richard Hammond & James May, Richard Hammond & James May
Series: Grey Novelette [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1832563
Comments: 17
Kudos: 8





	Grey Ship

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve never before quoted myself in my life. 
> 
> But.
> 
> “First TG/TGT fic I ever did and probably will ever do.”
> 
> * _so that was a fucking lie._ *

There are many uncertainties in this universe. What are we? Where are we going? How do photons work? Is this the only universe? Who killed Epstein? But one thing engraved in the stardust leftovers of the Big Bang's underlined argument of certainty for sure is the wit of James May. Universe made sure it counters the teeming pan on the other side of the beamscale.

James May is standing firmly on the ground with both feet unlike these two dimwits. His basic choices are pebbled with the path of logic and without him, Hammond and Clarkson would end up dead in a boiling _Jaguar XJR_ somewhere in the ditch in the most undignified poses such a stupid way to die can offer already back in 2003.

He takes a punctilious approach towards the problem and sees the solution to it first, and it doesn’t matter how slow the process is to solve it, _it is going to work_.

Long are the odds.

But he sits there, reads the news, takes a laugh from Clarkson, comments what he is scripted to, receives some more laughs and all in all, is a bag the other two absolute children can take turns in punching.

He doesn’t mind.

It’s work.

And he can’t imagine doing anything else with anyone else. Doesn’t want to.

This show is a combat. It’s always a two on one banter, ganging up on whoever’s that day’s target and it’s normally him. Or Hammond. Because obviously no one can touch Jeremy.

However, James finds it reasonably easy to bring things back under control because that’s what he’s best at. The only realistic judge in this fucked up petrolhead judiciary.

It isn’t a one-off occasion that he thinks how perhaps God had brought them together just so He can sit back and have something to laugh at. That’s cruel, James decides. Did He laugh when he slam-dunked May’s head on the rock in Syria? Did He point at his cloudy Screen of Creation when Richard nearly ended up decapitated in 2006? May is fine without knowing.

He knows it’s Thursday when he’s driving to work and feels a bit light-headed. And it’s odd because no matter how much time he spends in a pub the night before, he’s always solid on both feet the following morning.

He makes sure he goes slower than he usually does when he notices his eyes can’t focus. Blinking doesn’t solve the issue.

Something tickles him in the brain and it’s an itch he cannot think away. Instead, he tries to revise the duties he is meant to fulfil at the office today. Not that Lucy wouldn’t be helpful enough to jump in whenever he needed. There is virtually no rush. Clever little head.

However his eyes won’t cooperate and they are starting to burn. James rubs them. His ears ring; it’s a high pitch and he is rocking slightly along the dizziness that stirs his brain. Bollocks. He can’t be bothered with this now.

He decides to pull over to clear his thoughts, least he indeed causes an accident (because that is Hammond’s profession) and rubs his eyes, tries a few deep breaths and cups his fingers around his nose for a moment. He would be a failure to the whole of Britain if he is having hangover leftovers. A decision falls that he will pay just a little extra care in the future about what and how much, but knows that when a chum gets his first pint, he doesn’t bother counting any further.

He puts his hands back — but he doesn’t hold the wheel anymore. His fingers grip empty air like a child that wants to be picked up. The daze is gone, but it’s brought something strange with it.

James feels, in this abstruse moment, an insinuating lurch of a traitorous notion, that he isn’t where he is supposed to be anymore.

And he can tell without a question.

This isn’t his lovely _Toyota Mirai_. The sound of the engine is louder and gruffer and he feels the tingles of its massive vibrations crawling up his spine. A smell he doesn’t recognize is entering his nostrils, spinning a funnel all the way up to his synapses. They respond by making him open his eyes.

Wide windscreen, plastic dashboard, huge, heavy gearbox, elevated level, bulky suspensions.

As a proper gearhead, May doesn’t take long to deduct.

Safe to say, it’s a Vogue V8 Rover, 2002.

Tragically old.

And it's an odd maelstrom in the Vogue V8 Rover.

The genteel dashboard contains an open, antique-looking pocket watch ticking away seconds, a vintage metal card with a Volskwagen Microbus that said _“Gute reise”_ (Safe trip, hah! I am a German god!), off the mirror hangs a small sewn souvenir-sized white shirt with "Marcelo" written on top, and a big number "12" under it. On the radio, The Hollies and _"Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress"_.

“I love that song”, he says automatically.

“Every human being with a decent IQ loves that song.”

Whoever speaks is to his left and driving. A left-wheel drive. Great.

James tries to look, but he can’t seem to make himself turn his head. He can only describe it similar to zoning out and being too lazy to zone back in while at the same time being aware of surrounding dynamics. He attempts to move his eyes, but they don’t listen, either. James hits a certain point where he can avert them, but they hit the invisible barrier anew.

So he looks out of the window.

Notices the cleft asphalt of the London road is gone.

The drive is grovelling up a curvy, dust-rising macadam, advancing through misty surroundings, and by all accounts, May’s side is facing a sheer cliffdrop that disappears into the murky sea of thick silver cover. Like one of those mountain roads that never ends, seemingly climbing indefinitely.

“Hey”, the driver speaks again, more enthusiastically this time. This enthusiasm hurts May’s ears in its abruptness. “D’yknow how Hammond would sound in Spanish?”

“What?”

“Ricardo Ammondo.”

“Good for him.”

“You know yours?”

“No.”

“James Mayo.”

This has him emitting a huff because the driver spelled James like _Huh-mes_. A warped, Spanish-Latino way to ruin a proper gent’s name. But the smile doesn’t die out on his face that fast because he’s already gone.

“Alright, I don’t even have to ask anymore.”

A brief pause.

“Jeremías Hijo de Clark.”

He snorts. Then louder. Then he starts giggling in his creaking, asthmatic-duck manner people seem to enjoy for some reason. He doesn’t care because nobody is watching him now and no cameras to bump your head on in the corner of the car.

And he absolutely, beautifully loses it. He loses it similarly to his first impression of a statue in Japan or Robohon’s first _‘Bim’_ passage and he can’t stop because he imagines Jeremy with tan skin and inverted V moustache, a sombrero and a small guitar screaming _‘¡Velocidad!’_ and _‘¡Fuerza!’_ and it’s all too much and it’s so stupid and he is too old for this.

He realizes that he’s the only one laughing — and he’s not used to this feeling — so his irrational joy is short-lived. The laughter dies out in a funny intonation which Sarah would name a _ritardando_ upsweep. It settles, uneasily onto plastic dashboard and James notices briefly that the small pocket watch is ticking backward. Thought of laughing seems very distant now.

“Do you know where you are, James?” the driver asks.

No matter how hard he tries, May still can’t look at him. He doesn’t even see him from the peripheral vision. Instead, there is only a blur, a droplet smeared on a delicate objective glass ready to be shoved under a microscope. It doesn’t have colour. It doesn’t have shape. It just is.

But James May has wit. God has created him to be smarted than the other two, so he must have _some_ idea about this.

“Not here”, he finally decides. “Because where I am apparently isn’t where I’m supposed to be since that place is determined by the trajectory of this car. Therefore _my_ question should be ‘Where are we going’?”

The voice chuckles. It sounds like it has changed colour. Like paint transcended from the brush being dragged on a canvas is changing tone as it descends down the paper. It’s an amusing sound and James finds it interesting.

“And how is your spine?”

Instinctively, May wriggles his shoulders and hips against the leather seats and yes, the aches from their wet misadventures on boats are still woven into his bones. They probably won’t leave until he’s yeed his last haw. But the pleasant tingles in the small of his back while driving his _Ferrari 458_ are more than therapeutic enough to annul the pain.

“There’s still some grip to it”, he admits leisurely. “If Jeremy mentions words ‘water’ and ‘next location’ combined together again, I’ll shove him in my oven and feed him to the poor.”

“Do you resent him for it?”

James thinks. “No, not really. I mean, we _did_ have fun, I wouldn’t say it was all that horrible.”

“I meant do you resent him for keeping you on a tight rein?”

May tries to excavate a bona fide response from his proper argument-injected brain, but this time, he is left empty-handed. Even as it isn’t that he hadn’t asked himself the same question, it appears distant, packed into a caboose of memories long ago slid down the electric synapses. He is alone in a vertiginous helix of the question.

The driver, plucking him out of the clodhopping whirring, advises:

“You mustn’t confine your thinkings into pits where they don’t belong.”

James is flummoxed. “Why not? I thought I was supposed to be the governor of my own decisions, I’ve been there before. That must count for _something_.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Why?”

The timbre of the voice changes again, sliding from a sandpaper guttural rockfall to a caressing flutter of intricate angel hair, sprouting goosebumps down the presenter’s arms.

“Because you wanted to leave. Several times you thought of leaving. You still do. And yet here you are.”

May wants to rocket excuses like only Hammond can, but he doesn’t. Instead, he tries to cannon a glare at the driver, but he can’t. His eyes won’t listen. He experiments by roaming them around, surveying the smooth interior of a surprisingly fresh car, delicate paint and zipping-past rock-grassy landscape. But he can’t look to the left. The farthest he can go is to the gearbox. And only when the driver’s hand isn’t on it.

“I say there are two hanging rings: at some point you decided you owed him and combed your reality around it. The other one is looped around your fright.” There’s a cruel chuckle: it’s dipped into a kaleidoscopic spectre of two or more undertones. “When are you going to tell them how frightened you really are?”

“Let me out.”

“You’re stuck. Tell me I’m wrong, or look me in the eye.”

He’s turning apoplectic now. He is seething from every pore of his body. It’s suddenly becoming stuffy inside and he fights the urge to undo the top button of his shirt.

He can’t look. He can’t.

It’s all clouded.

He’s stuck.

May’s breaths deepen and become more erratic.

“You see? We create what we give, and vice-versa”, says the driver. His voice is a cluster of atonal notes.

James feels he’s about to hyperventilate, but doesn’t allow himself before wheezing, “Why is this something I should believe?”

“A fly doesn’t ram into glass over and over again trying to get out because it’s stupid. It does it because last time it evolved over two hundred million years ago, the glass barriers didn’t exist. According to a fly, there is no such thing as glass windows.”

All of a sudden, the music slows down. And keeps on slowing, becoming warped, reverbing around James like a maelstrom of air until it’s so slow that is sounds like an ocean, the space between accentuated bar beats stretched seemingly into eternity.

Following it, the _paysage_ on the exterior of the 4X4 starts melting. The sky is leaking, turning into ink, the bushes are a dripping candle wax, the macadam palpates and the surroundings quave. The car is sultry, James is choking. 

Suddenly, a swarm of wires burst out of the dashboard; thin metallic snakes humming minaciously. They wind themselves around his limbs and neck, gluing his arms to the armrests and making his ribs creak. Invisible fingers claw around his neck and he wants to tear it open and James helplessly gurgles, struggling.

But he is stuck.

Air gets sucked out of him faster than he can comprehend, out of the car and collapses into itself. The Rover leaks out of reality like a sorry sight of a half-finished painting melting in the rain.

James squeezes his eyes shut.

Then the music is gone in a snap. Sound dispersing like a firecracker, death in ink.

The wires are gone. Plain vanished.

He is free, just like that.

The air comes back and he almost vomits in trying to suck it all in all at once. He continues heavy breaths, body trembling, not daring to open his eyes again. He only hears himself, but on the inside. Like he’s having fingers plunged in his ears.

He is wrung inside-out.

His heart is a bass-boosted drum, banging insistently against his sore eardrums that _‘I still exist I am **not** stuck!’_. 

James cries out, but doesn’t feel it, doesn’t hear it.

The darkness starts to leak away. It is replaced by brush strokes of light and navy blue as the Sun gives first sign of its arrival. They give shapes grey solidity. Walls, carpet, chairs, cabinets. 

James gives a blood-curdling scream and it is filled with horror. He doesn’t want to see. He _can’t_ see. The walls, corners, windows, garden, concrete, trees, embroidered in some half-darkness that was the only thing worse than complete darkness. With non-darkness come questions. And then he can’t breathe.

James hides under the piano that is tucked in the corner of the room

( _his_ room)

and faces the wall. Shivers. Covers his head. He is invisible.

Spreading. It’s a cancer paradox.

_Stuck. Stuck under that piano, cowering like an animal._

No.

There is no floor anymore. No piano anymore. Only air. Empty vacuum.

A wall of something solid stretching in all visible directions is charging at him. James doesn’t even manage to life his arms up when it hits him. 

But the impact doesn’t come. It’s like walking through a stiff curtain — James is embrocated only by the outburst of swelling sensation of contentment and rapture — a soft, sweet-smelling duvet during a cold winter night, turning him languid, limbs flailing.

And suddenly, the whole world is slowed down. He feels viscid thickness dragging him down and into itself. He is snailing into the void.

Water.

All around him.

There isn’t even a fall, a splash, a pull. He doesn’t move a finger during the whole ordeal. It was just being dry in one second, and then completely wet in the other, surrendered to its lazy flow.

He can’t breathe again, but this is different. He very quickly realizes he doesn’t have to. His lungs aren’t complaining.

In fact, they don’t work.

But his senses seem to. So he looks around, sees nothing. There is no backdrop. Just void. He sees nothing. Not even himself.

He has to put an effort through the resisting water to attempt to see if he could see his palm stretched in front of his face. There is nothing. May just about wonders if he’s even conducted the gesture and thinks he’s gone blind. 

He just about manages to wonder what kind of Atlantic ridge bottom place he’s at when the cold, moist, matter-filled version of space gets lit up, washed over by bright white-bluish light. And then there’s darkness again. 

Along its existence, a very strange, solid sound enters James May’s ears. He’s sure it doesn’t exist, but he associates it to deep screeching groan of old, rusty metal decaying between teeth of time to calm the brain’s need for answers. 

The light appears again and flickers like a bad light bulb. James quickly turns his head to locate it; his hair freely flows around his head liberated from gravity and he probably looks like a fucking princess. 

He doesn’t realize he’s seen something until it becomes black again because it’s outwardly too enormous to be noticed. James keeps his head in the direction he saw the light come from in hope to have this ostensible thought confirmed.

And the new wave of white-bluish light comes indeed. Only when it turns dark again, May is left startled and deeply disturbed. 

What he saw is a shape is beyond description and beyond any comparison. It is bigger than anything he’s ever seen, and he anticipated the most unexpected.

It’s miles away, and it’s invisible in its immensity. It’s miles long and miles high, elongated and blunt, aeons old and gnawed with time that is older than this Earth. It resembled a sunken ship and was structured of intertwined, very delicately shaped metallic vines. It pulsated in strange fashion, like it was breathing.

James is filled with enormity and anxiety he doesn’t want to meddle with, and it makes him sick. When the shivering light is cast onto the murky surroundings again, James notices the light is dispersed in clusters of millions of stars all over its body. It’s a miniature galaxy.

It is like seeing the blanket of night sky blinking on and off. With all wrong, unearthly air around it.

He can’t understand how, but he is able to convert the light signals into palpable language.

It’s alive.

It’s hungry.

It knows he is there.

James feels a tugging sensation like somebody used an index finger and a thumb to pinch at every cell of his body to pull him forward. He waves his arms, but to no avail. He is being dragged, speeding up until he travels through black water faster than he ever did in any car and when he screams, bubbles of air leave his mouth.

The quivering lights are now blinking ferociously, spreading, shrieking, moaning, droning, getting closer and going supernova until James is blind and drowns into forever nothingness.

  
  


His eyes slowly flutter open. Suddenly, he is entirely elsewhere. Elsewhen. He can feel he’s becoming hylic because familiar aches nip at the sore spots of his back, neck, hips and joints. 

James is real again.

He feels proper age again. The remnants of the warped, eight hundred percent slowed-down music are dispersing out of his ears like a post-eruption wave, remnants of an evaporating dream he will soon forget.

The room is white and very real. He sees white walls, blue vertical window blinds and several people gathered around the bed.

He recognizes with swelling newborn love his other half; blonde hair, grey-green eyes, narrow-framed square spectacles and the look he was given when he returned from Syria with a vibrating bulge on the back of his head; a mixture of reproving and muscle-tensing worry.

Sarah looks unspeakably beautiful.

He wants to apologize, but then recognizes the other three residents in the room. Clarkson to his right, sitting in a chair, biting through his lower lip, observing him. He hates hospital chairs because they are disgustingly uncomfortable for arses, as he has proclaimed infinite times while waiting for Hammond to recover in Switzerland. 

Speaking of which, he is there, too. The loquacious member of the three is shoved sitting in a two-seater, pushed farther back, dozed off in a disturbed snooze with his head kicked back against the backrest. His face looks odd, but James can’t really wrap his mind around why. 

He’s cradling Willow’s head who is asleep in his lap. The love this man flaunted with for his daughters wielded more power than a nuclear power plant, and James would’ve been jealous if he didn’t know he was Willow’s favourite. There is his answer as to why Clarkson has to suffer in a chair. 

Sarah asks him if he can hear her. Quietly. Which is a nice gesture since May would like to spare his ears from Hammond’s booming voice or anything louder than a snowflake pirouetting to the ground. 

He can only respond by skidding his eyes to the side she was sitting at and lick his dehydrated lips and take one bigger breath, unabashedly delighted that he can do so openly.

But that is the peak of his physical capabilities. He tries really hard and arduously manages to make the fingers of his left hand move. She doesn’t get it.

She tells him something that he is still too woozy from all the medical liquids that flow through his veins to grip strings about, but he manages to concoct it into a half-hearted excuse of a completely mismatched lego-house, to the utmost dismay of his OCD — that the bottle of his gin had been injected with a lethal mixture of ketamine and lithium or something to that extent. That he is lucky to still be alive and that God must’ve really been proud of this child because He didn’t want him to leave Earth just yet.

Honestly, James might’ve gotten that all wrong.

He’s way too muzzy to allow stray thoughts.

He drifts off again. Feels Sarah’s hand finally take his and now he can’t squeeze it in time.

  
  


When he’s next awake, both Sarah and Willow are gone. Jeremy doesn’t look like he’s moved at all. And he has the weakest bladder of the three of them. He’s still looking at James. His eyes are glassy. Has he slept at all?

“How do you feel?” 

Jezza’s voice is scraping hoarse and he either didn’t sleep a wink or he smoked an entire pack of fags just recently. Too much alike to one version of the voice in the Range Rover.

James suppresses a shudder that wriggles free either way.

_Your back are going to go stiff and we will be forced to listen to your moaning for days on end again, get up, you muppet._

James manages a grumble which will definitely not be an adequate interpretation of his response. 

He looks other way to the two-seater. Hammond. There is moisture on his eyelashes. His eyes are red. That is why his face looked odd.

James wants to tell him something quirky to the effect of how he’s a wimpy cock, how girlish he is and if they were back in school he would’ve gotten beaten up which wouldn’t take much effort anyway. 

But nothing leaves his mouth.

He needs a few moments to remember how it is supposed to work. Until then, he remembers how thoughts are formed. 

First thing he wants to ask is if Richard had an impression that he was dead in his first horrific crash. And if so, was he drowning. 

But then he works out his tools and what he says is,

“You look like rubbish.”

And it’s all Richard needs.

He catapults out of the sofa. He’s on his knees by the bed, clutching James’ hand with both of his like it is a rope that keeps him from plummeting into the chasm, head bowed while his shoulders shake with sobs. 

May wants to mock him again, but instead something even crueller worms its way out of his mouth.

“Now you know how it feels, you cockface.”

Hammond makes a sound that explodes into a muddle of a sob and a laugh and lifts his head. He looks horrible and exhausted and awkward and loses his entire cool he keeps swaggering about with wherever he goes, and he’s hideous. Bloody Nora, he’s ugly, with all this snot coming out of his nose and red splotches on his cheeks and the stupid grin that doesn’t go with those glittering, sad, terrified eyes. But somehow, James May has never seen a more blessed sight.

“Don’t ever do that again, you stupid dog. You almost died. You almost _died_.”

Another proof that he’s lost his cool. He can’t think of a proper insult.

“I won’t if you won’t”, James promises.

Clarkson snorts in his chair. He doesn’t have any trace on him, but James knew him long enough to know for certain he wasn’t completely dry through the whole ordeal. He does, however, give James a long, fond look while Hammond isn’t looking. It’s almost private, meant solely for him. But it says more than what the two of them had exchanged in words in front or behind camera lenses over the years. 

James closes his eyes and gives Hammond’s clawing hands a reassuring squeeze before succumbing to fatiuge again and when he next wakes up Jeremy is finally sleeping in the chair with his chin tucked to his chest and one leg supported on May’s bed. With a shoe on. 

Richard is asleep with his head on the bed, still kneeling in a position that doesn’t look the least bit comfortable. Still having a swarm of fingers on his hand. Loose, but there.

James feels the stability Hammond gives him. It’s firm in its touch no matter how feathery light it is.

May grunts as he invests more energy than he thought he had to into sliding his leg ten centimetres to the right so it comes in contact with the tip of Jeremy’s shoe. He watches for reaction his traitorous move might’ve caused, but the older man doesn’t flinch.

James ensures with a subtle squeeze and release that Richard’s fingers are still there before finally relaxing back into the pillow. He takes these miniature contacts with the two and sets them as foundation pillars for the sake of his sanity.

Gripping him. 

Rooting him.

Back to where he belongs.

Preventing him from being taken away.

Filled with stupendous gratitude and adoration, James holds onto them. Holds tight because they are the only ones who can convince him he is alive and not a part of some fever dream where he has absolutely no control and even less an idea what is going on. They are here to tell him without words, that he’s not being puppeted with.

He is not stuck. He is grounded. And now he sees the difference.

He is precisely where he wants to be.

Sarah comes back from a short power-break with Mindy and the girls and finds them like that, but doesn’t do anything to shatter the sight. She knows enough about art to know that a finely aligned formation is only able to remain perfect if it isn’t spoiled by the outside factors, be it physical or any other.

With that in mind, she closes the door as quietly as possible without further ado and goes to get another coffee. Her other half is going to be just fine.


End file.
